


Writing the Marinette's Abs series

by OldAnimeFan



Series: Marinette's Abs [10]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Gen, Marinette's abs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 15:37:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8850538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldAnimeFan/pseuds/OldAnimeFan
Summary: Notes on how I wrote the Marinette's Abs series.





	

How did Ladybug learn all those Martial Arts moves she uses all the time in the TV series?

That was the main question I started out with in the "Marinette's Abs" series. And there were several other questions I tried to answer too.

First, as shown in the TV series, Ladybug was always using martial arts moves in her fights with the Akumatized villains. Marinette most certainly didn't know any martial arts. So how did Ladybug know them?

Of course, I suppose that Marinette could have looked them up on the Internet, but just reading text or looking at a video would not help that much. You actually had to learn the moves by doing them, with a knowledgeable instructor to show you how to do them properly, how to defend against them, and what happens when you did them wrong. And you needed to practice against a skilled partner.

I most certainly couldn't see Ladybug asking Cat Noir for instructions in how to fight. She would definitely not want him to know that she wasn't as good as he was in anything. And I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have trusted Cat Noir to be "knowledgeable" in anything. But I saw that Adrien had studied karate as he said in one of the episodes, so decided that he would teach Marinette. And that what Marinette learned, Ladybug could also do, but so much better. And that if Ladybug practiced it, that would also improve Marinette's skills.

From the first episode of the TV series (and from the origin story later), we saw that Ladybug was strong and agile right from the beginning, much more so that any normal human, jumping twenty feet from the ground to the Paris rooftops, even without using her yoyo. The only difference between her and Marinette was her Miraculous. Spots On, she's Ladybug. Spots Off, she's Marinette. So the Miraculous must be responsible for giving her super-strength and super-agility. And we know from the Lady Wifi episode that the Miraculous was magical, so it was easy to attribute Ladybug's super... everything to her Miraculous.

And there's the MacGuffin, Marinette's abs.

(A "MacGuffin" is the thing that drives the story, the thing the bad guys are trying to steal, the thing the good guys are trying to protect, or, as in this case, something that ties the individual stories together.)

I came across a few references to Marinette having abs, muscular abs. And obviously, she didn't have them before she became Ladybug. So how did she get them? I postulated that Marinette's muscles didn't just come into being. They must have come from somewhere. 

Ladybug!

Ladybug did all those exercises, running along the Paris rooftops at full speed, jumping up to rooftops and from building to building, swinging on her yoyo string, and doing all that physical exercise that Marinette didn't and couldn't do.

Well, I guess that Marinette would have been helping her father in the bakery, lifting those 50-pound sacks of flour, carrying those completed cakes and cake sculptures around the shop, and taking those pans of hundreds of cookies and croissants out of the oven and arranging them in the display cases. And there was that she was always late, and would always need to run to make it to school or to her next activity on time, and in general, was always running everywhere. So I guess Marinette could have gotten some of her strength and stamina from those.

But those abs muscles would have come from Ladybug and her athletic activities.

Marinette's abs have a part in every story. Some of those parts are major ones, and some are minor. But you see her abs in every story, at least a little. That's the MacGuffin.

Writing Style:

I wanted the first eight stories to be told from Marinette's point of view. So I wanted the stories to be written in an informal English style (you won't find a colon or semicolon anywhere, just commas), one that duplicated the way a teenager would think and speak. I used a lot of ellipses, ("..."), and a lot of choppy sentences to break up the sentences into fragments, as someone would talk or think, pausing between thoughts. So, you will notice that there are a lot of sentence fragments and also a lot of colloquialisms. I wrote the stories with Microsoft Word, then ran them through its grammar checker, though most of the changes it wanted me to make, I ignored.

As an aside, I used the statistics checker in Word, and found that what I wrote was generally at the 5th grade level. I don't try to write at a particular level, it just comes out that way, from my natural writing style.

In general, I only did one real draft of each story. I did go back and clean it up, and rephrase some parts, but what you see is what I did in the first draft. But I didn't write it in one sitting. So I would reread it from the beginning and correct it as I read it, before I continued writing the next page or so. And after I was done with a story, I put that story aside and started the next story, which sometimes required that I modify the previous story to fit the action in that next story. And as I wrote that next story, I would re-read the previous story. So I always had one story complete, being reviewed, while I worked on the next one.

As another aside, the way I write, I added a lot of details that relate to the original series. So often, you will see Marinette do something that you know she would do in the TV series ("Adrien! Eeeeeeee!" for example). I also added a lot of minor details in the stories that actually foreshadowed plot points in following stories. So sometimes, you can say, "Oh, that's what he meant three stories back," or "That's where that came from."

As a third aside, I added some International words and spelling to the stories, as they are supposed to take place in France. So, in general, before you accuse me of misspelling a word, look it up on Google to make sure it isn't the International spelling of the word (metre instead of meter, for example). I also did a lot of research, for example looking up how the French copyright and design right their clothing designs. I ended up spending about as much time researching as I did writing.

Writing the series:

I started out writing the series by just writing a page of sentences that outlined each of the series stories. I completed all the stories in this shortened form, and as I completed each outline, I added to the previous outlines as needed to fit. As I wrote and thought, I often saw a scene I wanted to add to previous ones, so I would update them. So before I started, I had all the stories thought out (except I had Gabriel and Vincent as one story, but it just grew on me so I broke it in two).

And I had done all this before I started watching the second series (Nickelodeon Episodes 14 to 26). So if there is anything in my stories that conflicts with these episodes, I thought of it before I saw them. (And as a related aside, I outlined a separate Halloween story I wanted to do, that you won't ever see, where the school class at Adrien's mansion for a party are all turned into their Akumatized counterparts, controlled by one of the characters. And before I could start writing, I saw the Puppeteer episode...)

Alya: For the first story, I decided that Alya would be the one to discover that Marinette had abs, since Alya was her closest friend. And Marinette could trust Alya with her secret (though this didn't last more than one story). And you see a little in this story that Marinette designs and sews her own clothes, the ones she wears every day.

Chloé: For this story, I decided that the whole class would discover Marinette's abs at the beach. Originally, I had decided that this was all that would happen at the beach. But Chloé's part in it seemed so natural that I added her to the story. And she came out a lot more noble than I thought she would have. As I was writing, I decided to add a typical beach/water game, "Chicken" (or the French equivalent) to the story. That part of the story with Mylène was completely unscripted. It isn't even in my outline. It just decided to add itself to the story all by itself, and who am I to argue with my keyboard. And I liked it.

Adrien: I needed for Adrien to teach karate to Marinette. So I concocted the excuse that he was teaching her karate so she could learn to defend herself, and to help her clumsiness. And we also got to see that Marinette was actually a top clothing designer, when she designed and sewed together her new karate outfit (the one with the abs-baring design) in only one weekend. We also found out that Ladybug was gaining experience from Marinette's karate training, and that when Ladybug trained by herself, using her super-powers, Marinette also gained in experience.

Chloé (again): Of course, when Adrien was anywhere, Chloé wanted to be there too. So, I added Chloé, and also Alya, to the karate lessons that Adrien was teaching. But as expected, Chloé didn't really want to learn. Instead, she just wanted to be with Adrien. So she didn't stay for the next story. But we found that Alya was actually quite skilled in capoeira, and that she had learned this from her time when she lived on Martinique, in the Caribbean. And this answered the question that came up in the Lady Wifi TV episode, of how Lady Wifi (Alya) could have defeated Cat Noir in their fight (she was actually much better than Cat was in that fight, since her fighting skills were better and were enhanced by her being Akumatized). We also saw how Marinette's karate skills had been transferred to Ladybug when she soundly defeated Boxer, while Cat Noir had a hard time defeating Boxer's identical clone.

Sabrina: While Chloé didn't really want to learn to fight, Sabrina did. But we see that she has a weakness, in that she loses control when fighting. We also see that Alya is not that much into karate, but would rather fight using her own style. But she adds elements of karate to her style. And at the end, Chloé pulls Sabrina out of the class. (For those who missed it, when Adrien is training Sabrina and she loses control again, he calls her a "wildcat," and thus the name and character in the last story.)

Alix: As we know, Alix is highly competitive, but petite. So, I added her to the karate training, as I thought she might want to learn karate. But after looking at the different martial arts, I realized she would be a natural at judo, since it relied so much more on skill than size. And of course, I let her teach judo to the others (though Adrien/Cat Noir didn't really learn it that well, as shown in the next few stories). And, I thought that Alix would also be tough, so she would be the one to teach street fighting (though there really isn't any skill to that). (As an aside here too, I originally thought Alix would know judo and would teach it to Marinette, who would transfer it to Ladybug. And then I saw the "Puppeteer" episode, where Ladybug uses a judo joint lock on Cat Noir's arm to disable him when she thought he was under Puppeteer's control...)

Gabriel: Originally, this story was going to have a little of Gabriel Agreste buying Marinette's design then go right into the photoshoot. But Gabriel and Marinette got talking about the fashion industry and I couldn't pull them away. Even Adrien was bored.

Vincent: (Note this is not the Akumatized villain Vincent, but the fashion/news/school-picture photographer, Vincent). In this one, everyone shows up and takes part (except for Alix). And of course, since this is a sport/action/martial-arts photoshoot, Chloé isn't allowed in. Even calling her father doesn't help, since he wanted to gain favor with Gabriel Agreste, and thus doesn't allow Chloé to disrupt the photoshoot. This is the last "official" story in the Marinette's Abs series.

Wildcat: This is written in a TV episode style. It is done in the third person (all the other stories were done in the first person, strictly from Marinette's Point of View). Sabrina finds out that she is blamed by Chloé for the times in the above stories that Chloé didn't get to be with Adrien (though not her fault). She is also told by Chloé that Ladybug is now her favorite, and she isn't. So she hates Ladybug, and wishes that Ladybug would disappear. She gets Akumatized by Hawk Moth, who gives her Ladybug's strength and agility and tells her to take Ladybug's Miraculous, and Ladybug won't be around anymore. Sabrina uses what skills she has learned to first take down Cat Noir, then go after Ladybug. She fights Ladybug using her karate skills, then her "street fighting" skills where she loses control. Ladybug defeats her with the help of Cat Noir, but realizes that there will always be someone stronger of more agile or, generally, better.

I don't have any more stories planned for this series. It was fun writing it (all 38,000 words of it). Maybe I'll do some other ones, though if I do, they'll probably be individual stories, probably like TV episodes. But I don't have that any plans yet (well, not much more than a couple titles and ideas).

an Old Anime Fan


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